The new Middle East online editor for BBC News has been praised by a pro-Israeli website for being “willing to listen to his critics” after he sent internal emails guiding BBC staff to write more favorably about Israel.

The Eyal terminal at the city of Qalqiliya is one of forty fixed checkpoints located along the boundary between the occupied West Bank and Israel. The terminals are part of an elaborate system of physical and administrative obstacles that Palestinians must navigate in order to enter Israel to work. Every Sunday thousands arrive to the terminal before sunrise to begin their workweek; for many it’s the start of a 12-plus hour day which will begin and end at the same metal turnstile.

The BBC is coming under increasing pressure from British Members of Parliament (MPs) and leading pro-Palestinian organizations over recent decisions that throw its impartiality in reporting on the Israeli occupation into serious doubt.

The BBC has provided evidence this week that it prefers to use the territorial claims of the Israeli government to the whole of Jerusalem as a framework for its reporting, rather than acknowledging international law.

The American poet T.S. Eliot wrote that “April is the cruelest month.” The phrase springs to mind in April 2013, the month that a new director-general took up his post at the BBC and, within two weeks, had installed a line-up of hardline Zionists at the top of the world’s largest publicly-funded news organization.

The extent to which the BBC is prepared to misreport on the Israeli occupation has been made clear once again. A new ruling by the BBC Trust has defended the corporation’s coverage of the Rachel Corrie case, even though it falsely implied that the unarmed activist was in some way responsible for the deaths of Israeli soldiers.

Non-violent protesters came up with a novel way to protest Israeli plans to build more settlement colonies in the occupied West Bank: They occupied the land themselves. The Bab Al Shams tents went up on Friday on privately owned Palestinianland in what Israel designates as the E1 part of the West Bank. Israel‘s announcement of a plan to build new colonies in that part of the West Bank was especially controversial. Continue reading this...

In direct reaction to Israel provoking the Al Aqsa Intifada, on October 19, 2000, the then United Nations Human Rights Commission (now Council) condemned Israel for inflicting “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” upon the Palestinian people, some of whom are Christians, but most of whom are Muslims.[i] Continue reading this...

Palestinian Youth Injured By Army Fire In RafahIMEMC – Palestinian medical sources reported, Tuesday evening, that a young Palestinian man was shot by a live round in the chest after Israeli soldiers, stationed across the border, opened fire at him east of Rafah city, in the southern part of the Gaza Strip. …

BBC News is in turmoil. Having last year dropped a report on claims of sexual abuse against the late DJ and television presenter Jimmy Savile, the flagship Newsnight programme this month wrongly implicated Tory peer Lord McAlpine in child abuse. As a result, after just 54 days in his job, the BBC director-general, George Entwistle, ‘stepped down’ on November 10. The BBC’s head of news, Helen Boaden, and her deputy, Stephen Mitchell, were then also ‘asked’ to ‘step aside’. Peter Rippon, the Newsnight editor responsible for the Savile decision, had already ‘stepped aside’.

Israeli air strikes have continued into the night in Gaza, after a missile killed the military commander of Hamas, Ahmed Jabari.

Dozens of rockets have been fired back into southern Israel following the strike. One has hit a shopping centre in a major Israeli city. At least eight people have been reported killed in Gaza so far – including three civilians. Residential buildings are among those destroyed. Continue reading this...